Saturday, March 11, 2006

(Via Synthstuff.) I guess I can see where they were going with this but I'm not sure they pulled it off.

A mental health charity has defended a statue it commissioned of Sir Winston Churchill in a straitjacket.

The statue has been criticised as “absurd and pathetic” by his grandson, Tory MP Nicholas Soames.

Charity Rethink commissioned the 9ft high sculpture, unveiled in Norwich, to highlight the stigma of mental health.

Rethink said the image of Churchill - who suffered bouts of depression - was designed to “portray a more positive image of people with mental illness”.

Now my wife works on a locked psych unit at a hospital and she just told me last week about the pictures of famous people who suffered from mental illness they have hanging in the common room (i.e. Lincoln, Hemingway, etc.) so I guess it can be helpful for patients to see successful people who have been in similar situations. However, she has worked in the field for over a decade and in all the stories she's told me never once did she mention the use of straitjackets. I don't know for sure but I think they're a bit of an anachronism, maybe not in the UK, I don't know. I know that patients have to be restrained at times and often they're medicated for everyone's safety but does this group that commissioned the straitjacketed Churchill really want to associate mental illness with one of the most stereotypical and fearsome objects linked to mental illness? I undertand it's a metaphor but still.

Monday, January 02, 2006

Mark Steyn has a long article in The New Criterion that's more or less a compilation of the general points he's made throughout the year (or last several years). It's comprehensive and tackles a number of issues through "the demography, stupid" as he's often said. I won't summarize the whole thing, but this section is worth excerpting.

This ought to be the left’s issue. I’m a conservative—I’m not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I’m with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the west’s collapsed birth rates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by “a woman’s right to choose,” in any sense. I watched that big abortion rally in Washington last year, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving “Keep your Bush off my bush” placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a “woman’s right to choose,” western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their “reproductive rights” still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of forty, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting “Hands off my bush!”

Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:

“Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies… . If you think that rape should be legal, then don’t vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body,” she advised Oprah’s viewers, “then you should vote.”

Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn’t even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.

But, after framing the 2004 Presidential election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman asks: “So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism—a new Dark Ages.”

Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft out there.

Longman’s point is well taken. The refined antennae of western liberals mean that, whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To fret about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are “white” or only 5 percent are. But, if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 9percent of the population or only 60, 50, 45 percent.

This seems to be the most important aspect of the GWOT, if not for the U.S., then certainly for Europe. Even Steyn crosses things up by using an American pro-abortion rally in the present to illustrate what won't be happening in Europe in a generation. I think this shows that we (the U.S.) are going to come out of this more intact that the Europeans will. It's been said a million times by conservative pundits like Steyn and in a jillion blog posts on the right side of the 'sphere that the confluence of Sharia-type values based in the sheer demographic realities of Europe and the multi-cultural left that turns a blind eye toward the eventual outcome of promoting "the other" is as big a part of this war as killing terrorists.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

The outlook for the Continent may appear hopeless, but it's not. Britain faced an equally severe crisis in the winter of 1979, when a series of strikes left the dead unburied and the garbage uncollected. Things got so bad that voters tossed out the Labor government and brought in free-market firebrand Margaret Thatcher. Today, Britain is the envy of Europe. France and its neighbors could make a similar rebound. Perhaps the flames emanating from Clichy-sous-Bois will illuminate Europe's problems and burn down some of the barriers to change.

Which brings up something I've been wondering: in all of the blog posts and news stories I've read since these riots started, I haven't seen Sabine Herold's name mentioned even once. (No hits on GoogleNews and nothing recent on Technorati. UPDATE: Well 2 posts when you search "All Languages.") In case you're unfamiliar with Ms. Herold here's a quick sketch from 2003. (Instapundit's archives would be a good place to look for other Herold references.)

France's exhaustion with its unions has found its voice in a 21-year-old student, Sabine Herold, who is challenging the silent majority to revolt against the strikes crippling her country and causing havoc for British travellers.

[...]

With her pale blue mascara and long eyelashes, she makes an unlikely Joan of Arc. But her words have found an echo in large protests by students and parents against repeated strikes by teachers and threats to disrupt this summer's exam schedule.

She has also become an emblem for the many in French society who believe that economic reforms are long overdue. She blames President Jacques Chirac for caving in repeatedly during his career to union pressure. The many British travellers who have been affected by the strikes in France can only hope her campaign succeeds.

Ms. Herold--or someone like her--is what France really needs right about now. Otherwise, it's not a stretch to figure that LePen will end up being the beneficiary of these riots and that doesn't bode well for anyone. A free-market type can fix some of the problems and certainly a lot less menacingly than a far-right nationalist. (Not to mention she seems pretty damn cute from the pictures I've seen, though I'm sure De Villepin thinks he's prettier.)

For a while there a few years ago, I really thought that Herold was going to become a pretty big player in France, at least on the level of providing a soundbite or two in response to whatever union was striking that week. I hope she's trying to figure out a way to interject herself into the politics of France of again, and while she's probably too young to get elected to office over there she could throw her weight behind a more seasoned candidate (Sarkozy?).

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

It shall combat social exclusion and discrimination, and shall promote social justice and protection, equality between women and men, solidarity between generations and protection of the rights of the child.

What an awful jumble of weaselry. Are you trying to say "All men are created equal"? Because I think copyright has expired on the Declaration of Independence. A quick cut-and-paste and you're away.

The EU Constitution is a monster so there's plenty more at the link. Also take a minute or two to really savor the phrase "an awful jumble of weaselry."

Friday, May 27, 2005

To recap, then: the Left views EU-Land as an Anglo-Saxon encroachment on their cherished (and embarrasingly scelerotic) social welfare state. The nostalgic Right misses things like de Gaulle's force de frappe and wonders worriedly what servility to the Bruxellian yoke would mean. Yes, of course, the economy looms large too. It has been stagnant for years, and chronic unemployment rankles, humiliates, angers even. There are also the problems associated with integrating immigrants from North Africa and points beyond. Such integration efforts have gotten trickier of late, as events in iconic havens of libertinism like Amsterdam have showcased real tensions increasingly rising to the fore. It's not far-fetched in the least to see more nativist backlash in the years ahead taking root. This too will likely have unfortunate economic ramifications. And, lest we forget, there is the d'Estaing point about the No's gaining strength because the vote is basically a plebescite on Chirac's government. No surprise, that. Chirac has increasingly become a discredited figure, peddling a transparently cheap neo-Gaullism (along with his old cohort Dominique de Villepin proferring whimsical, Boucherian-like dandyism, mixed with doses of feigned neo-Napoleonic grandeur meant to be taken seriously as diplomacy). Corruption charges persistently nip and dog Chirac too, of course. And much like another discredited figure, Gerhard Schroder, Chirac resorted to a paltry anti-Americanism (so soon after the death of 3,000 from that country in the largest terrorist attack in history); mostly because he had little but this diversion to peddle to his disillusioned public so as to distract them from a moribund economy, their manifold doubts about centralization of power in Brussels, their immigration fears, the specter of a political life in decay with charisma-less mediocrities like Lionel Jospin on the Left and too charismatic neo-fascists like Le Pen on the Right. (Worth noting, despite all the negativity, leaders like Tony Blair who took the harder road still end up, ultimately, being rewarded by their publics. People smell out character and conviction; just as they smell out opportunists and cads).

At the heart of the anxiety is an identity crisis: Many Europeans desperately want to preserve their generous social welfare systems, but realize that doing so puts them in danger of being left behind by the more cutthroat market economies of the United States and, increasingly, China and India.